It’s March 23, Easter Sunday, in the year of 1916. A smoky pub in the centre of Dublin city, bursting with Irish volunteers and crown haters, the scent of men’s sweat and stout medicine; tense anticipation is in the air. Schoolmaster and legend-to-be Patrick Pearse is cutting his way through the underground crowd, accompanied by Gaelic murmur.

Pearse’s freshly thwarted demonstration of Irish resistance to British oppression for this very day is still eating away at him, but he will not let his supporters see or feel his disappointment. He is determined to make a stand against the British and their century-long occupation of Ireland, Plan B must kick in, and now’s the crucial moment, it’s giving up or “now more than ever”.

He climbs the pub’s small stage, pint and hope in hand, to address the crowd.

And this is the song he never sung. But he could have, in this very moment, and maybe he or someone else did, who knows. The song about the Easter Rising of 1916 that was never recorded, lost in the fire fight of history, never recited, forgotten until today. The song that helped mobilise the demoralised debris. The song that summed up centuries of suffering into five minutes, that brought the pub’s atmosphere to the boil. The story song that was the final spark needed to light the historical Easter bonfire, flames enough to engrave freedom as something indeed achievable into the Irish soul. A fire that lasted for only six days, but whose smoke signals reached out years into the future, forming silhouettes of an independent Ireland, the Eire that was officially constituted in 1937.

These are the improbable song’s lyrics. It could have been called “9TEEN6TEEN”: